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Be Flexible When Planning and Writing Your Research Report

In order to ensure your report meets the objectives that you established from the beginning, it’s important that you adhere to a set of guidelines as you move from planning to writing the formal report.

Remain Flexible

While you are searching and locating sources useful in supporting your research objectives, new findings will lead you in different directions depending on what you find at each step in your investigation process. Because you will be actively writing, updating and changing your report while investigating new potential sources of information, you will want guidelines to keep you focused on answering your research objective. The following list is a set of questions that one French translator has compiled to help those working on research projects. Throughout your project, you should look back and review these questions:

What type of information do I need and why do I need it?

How should I phrase my questions to ensure that right information is collected?

How should I structure my presentation to communicate my process of inquiry and my findings?

As a certified translation worker, you should review these questions regularly during your project and you should be aware that your answers to them may change over time. At the offset, the first question is answered by the research purpose. The second question will be phrased in each of your research questions and serve as the blueprint for your report. The third question will be answered by your outline. During the research process, a respected Seattle German translation worker suggests that you need allow enough flexibility to allow modifications to your plan in case of unanticipated discoveries.

The following are some examples:

Just as you think your research report is nearly finished, you discover new variables that had not been identified in your statement of purpose. As a result, you now need to adjust your statement of research purpose to include the new variables.

You decide that certain issues that hadn’t been included in you should now be included or learn that critical information on one of research questions is unavailable. As a result, your research plan needs to be reworked.

While composing your initial draft, you determine that the organization is very poor and needs to be restructured. As a result, you come up with a new outline.

Keep in mind that your finished report will be the summation of many decisions and revisions. Always remain flexible and be prepared to revise and reshuffle as often as necessary.